Ballet done boldly
Luigi Bonino sees through another’s eyes. And the world he sees is a beautiful place. It is avant garde and flamboyant, with the shadow of a ballet maestro always beside him, but it’s not a dark presence. It is peacock-coloured with shine. The late Roland Petit pulls him along. A choreographer and dancer who changed the face of ballet from purely pretty to sexy, earthy and real as well.
Petit spotted Bonino when he was dancing with the Cullberg Ballet in Sweden and Bonino eventually became a favoured dancer, performing alongside Margot Fonteyn and having roles created for him.
They were great friends and Bonino almost falls off his chair as he uses his cache of theatrical gestures to explain the depth of feeling he has for his mentor.
‘‘He was a very, very funny man, but very strong and determined as well. He had passion. When I met him he was everywhere, like this’’ – Bonino clicks his bejewelled fingers in the air three times, making the waiter in the cafe look up – ‘‘very fast, and that’s why we had this incredible connection, because I was very fast too.’’
Petit was the man of the moment, collaborating with Picasso, Brassai, Jean Cocteau and Orson Welles. Petit, and his wife Zizi Jeanmarie beside him, were the ones you would have wanted at your party.
It was Zizi Jeanmarie that Petit created his Carmen for and it was the ballet that shocked audiences. The love pas de deux is erotic and carnal and the character of Carmen was startlingly feminist for the time. Even now, there is no character quite like Carmen in the breadth of ballet.
‘‘She is all woman, she is sensual and she is a real b .... She fights. She loves men. Carmen is strong, feminine and yes, a b .... But oh,’’ Bonino raises his hands to the heavens and the waiter looks nervous, ‘‘she is fabulous’’.
Royal New Zealand Ballet’s Mayu Tanigaito is one of the dancers who is getting to be fabulous. And she says it’s exciting, but frightening. She is a sweetheart, quietly spoken, quick to smile and apart from the fire in her belly to dance, she is not very Carmen in real life.
‘‘But I will be her. I will become her somehow. I love music and the music is amazing. Carmen doesn’t go into the music. She is against it. She fights.’’
Carmen has set her own rules and they are not the convention.
And so too, did Petit. He choreographed his own way. And it is not easy, says Bonino. When he walked into studio one at the RNZB, the first thing he did was tell the dancers they would be learning a new way.
‘‘The dancers are used to always being turned out and then I arrive and say no, it has to be straight, it has to be like boom, boom. It is very difficult and it takes a little while to try to understand when you have never danced in this way.’’
Not just the style, he says, but the emotion. Bonino explains with words that raise in pitch as he rises out of his chair to emphasise what he means.
‘‘It is passion’’, a fiery flourish, ‘‘a woman is a woman’’, a slow nod, ‘‘and a man is really a man’’, his chest is audibly pounded.
‘‘Touch is real touch and when he looks at her, he really looks at her.’’ Bonino’s stare is like granite.
And the kisses, it would appear, are also ‘‘true kisses’’. Bonino bounds out of his chair in class, ‘‘kiss him’’. Tanigaito giggles, ‘‘OK, OK.’’
Bonino is relentless in his energy, but also in his sense of humour. The dancers are exhausted. They have been pushed for days and weeks and the laughter is uproarious, but edged with fatigue.
Shaun James Kelly is dancing the lead in L’arle´sienne and he has spun, leapt, lifted and has also practised his plunge to death many times. But he is dancing what Bonino says is the ultimate role for a male dancer. ‘‘This is the one they come to me and beg to do.’’
Kelly says the choreography is amazing and different and it has to be right. Carmen